Image completion is used in many situations such as to edit digital photographs, to improve the quality of medical images, satellite images, images from security cameras and other types of images including image sequences. For example, a tear or stain on a photograph may be digitally repaired using image completion. In another example, an object in a foreground of a digital image may have been removed and the resulting hole is then completed.
Many existing approaches to image completion are manual and involve a user copying and pasting backgrounds to fill holes in a digital image. This is time consuming, error prone and complex.
There is an ongoing need to improve the quality of results of automated approaches whilst enabling image completion to be achieved in practical time scales in a cost effective manner.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known image completion systems.